The Double Edged Sword of Travel

On gender, privilege and stepping outside of your bubble

Dear friends,

I’ve never noticed my gender until I noticed the way that the twenty-two year old farm hands looked at me as I carried buckets of soil to the greenhouse.

“It might be too hard for you to carry two buckets at a time. We’ll be much faster than this,” they say.  

At first I was furious, frustrated, confused. Why was there an issue with the way I was doing the work?

I felt belittled, I felt less then, I felt that I didn’t belong in the work I was doing, all simply for the reason that what, I’m a woman?

Although I identify as a woman, gender has never been a determinant of who I am as a person. It’s not that black and white.

I grew up in the diverse neighbourhood of Corso Italia in Toronto Ontario, the melting pot of the North. From a young age I was exposed to all sorts of people challenging the status quo.

I grew up in a household free of gender roles. My father was the cook and my mother served as a strong female figure.

At the young age of six my parents sent my sister and I to an all girls camp where we would end up spending a large majority of our young life. At camp we were constantly challenged to do hard things and to question the idea of what society tells us that women are capable of.

Camp taught me that with a little elbow grease I could do anything I wanted to do and I could be anything I wanted to be.

As I continued into my staff years I had the privilege of watching young girls have this same realization as they carried the canoe across the portage and paddled through a raging storm.

In this environment I was surrounded by a diverse representation of not only what it can look like to be a woman, but what it looks like to be a human.

Camp was actually the last place I was doing manual labour akin to carrying buckets of soil. At camp we were supported in the challenges we faced with this work and the strengths we grew because of it. But the truth of the matter is that this safe bubble I was lucky enough to grow up in, is not the real world.

Stepping into the broader world revealed stark contrasts. In Central America, for example, most women don’t have the freedom to believe they can do or be anything they want.

Let me tell you a story about Thelma, a young woman from Guatemala. She excelled in school, earning straight A’s and dreaming of becoming a teacher. In Guatemala, attending high school requires tuition, which her family couldn’t afford. Determined, she worked hard and earned a full scholarship.

She excitedly shared the news with her father, who threw her certificate in the garbage.

“Women don’t need an education,” he said, and walked away.

In Central America there remains a clear division of labour. Men work in the fields, the women cook and clean. Women sell tortillas, and men drive the chicken buses. Women dedicate an additional 2.8 hours to unpaid domestic work and care than men, according to statistics analyzed by a Harvard review on gender equality in Central America.

When working on the farm in Belize, I saw this firsthand. Thelma worked alongside her husband Jose and their three daughters aged twelve, fourteen and sixteen.

As I watched the fourteen year old child yank a full grown workhorse across a field to plow the land, I was humbled, and empowered. The three girls and Thelma were also responsible for making us lunch, and when they returned home Thelma made dinner for her family. What amazed me most about these young women is that none of them actually enjoyed cooking or farming, but completed their tasks without complaint.

As someone who identifies as a feminist, I’ve often wondered why the women we’ve seen on our travels don’t stand up for themselves more. But that’s a privilege I hold—society has shown many women that doing so might not be safe. What is often safer is adhering to societal norms.

One reason these norms persist is the influence of gender ideology.

According to an article in The Advocacy for Human Rights in America, “Gender ideology is a conservative school of thought that defends traditional values on the concept of family and sexuality. Its agenda includes the rejection of same-sex marriage, gender identity diversity, sex education in schools, and abortion.”

This rigid framework enforces traditional gender roles and discourages deviation by framing it as immoral or unsafe. In El Salvador, for example, abortion is criminalized, and women can be convicted of murder and sentenced to up to fifty years in prison for losing a baby in childbirth, as Ana Maria Mendez Daron explains in the aforementioned article.

On a deeper level these issues lie in the cultures and the values of these countries, which can pose a real challenge to forward progress. Carolina Avalos Burges, author of the Harvard review suggests the critical importance of promoting policies with holistic and culturally sensitive approaches towards the transformation of social norms– which have a strong link with traditions and cultures and influence on human behaviour– to achieve gender equality.

During our time in Guatemala it was clear how the traditions of the Q’eqchi culture were closely related to their identity, and whilst these traditions upheld unequal views of men and women they also promoted a sense of autonomy and pride in their work. While these customs felt unfamiliar to me they were integral to their rhythm of life.  

On the other hand I also witnessed the collective anger amongst the local women for their lacking appreciation. A feeling of anger that’s been pent up for centuries as things remain the same and an expectation to please remains lingering in the air.

The expectation is hard to describe, but in some ways it is the feeling that everyone is looking at you. It’s the feeling that because you’re the only woman around you’re expected to cook everyone lunch– a feeling I felt myself when working on the farm in Belize.

I had a strong desire to influence positive change in these communities, but as a guest in these countries it didn’t feel like my responsibility. What did feel like my responsibility was to reflect on how travelling to new places teaches you how our upbringings shape our realities.

Most people will choose to spend the majority of their lives in the same bubble–the same community, the same city, the same country.

Choosing to step outside of this bubble revealed to me a double-edged sword: a world of magic, wonder, and beauty—the resilience of people, the richness of culture—followed by a reality check.

It’s easy to think the world you know is the only reality, but what is crucial is to recognize that it isn’t.